The view from here

My digital image folder for our terrace is arranged by year and by month, with various category-folders for each month like Citrus, Sunny Pots, Shade Pots, Ramps, Birds, and Table. There is also a small folder for each month called, View. This is the view.

It's not much probably. But it's also a lot. It's not the ocean, or mountains, or Central Park. But when I saw this apartment for the first time, I knew enough about views in New York City to know that this was A Good View. Why? Because, instead of house-windows staring right back at us at the end of the lots below, or a massive building blocking the sky, there was a long northern view across a lowslung rooftop, relieved by old, industrial  skylights. And beyond that, mature trees in the gardens one block over. They were in leaf, that August. Very green. On either side of the skylit roof, were - are - more expanses of empty, low rooftop, all sheltering a laundry empire whose parking lot beside us houses fastidiously parked white trucks that are washed squeaky-clean every Sunday (I didn't know that, then).

These low, wraparound rooves (roofs, for Americans) gave us two things, no, three precious things, in terms of hyper-urban life: light, sky, and privacy. You jump on that when you recognize it, and I jumped. While we lost a marvellous in-ground garden, we also lost the ever-present sense of living in a fishbowl (as well as a bonkers upstairs neighbor). 

It is inevitable, in a city where there is a dramatic shortage of housing, and where fortunes are made in real estate, that this view could not last. But it's something I have made (some) peace with. At some point a very large building will rise all around us. Before it rises, the existing structures will be demolished. And then impressive holes will be dug. New and massive foundations will be laid. Ours, 100 years old, will shudder. 

I am not sure where we will be, when it happens, but not here. 

In the meantime, I will add more View folders to my monthly collections as the year unfolds, and we will watch the light on the skylights and rooftops,  the hawks and the woodpeckers in the old catalpa, the trees beginning to leaf out, and the occasional raccoons rambling on their twilit errands. 

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